More Progress In VR Exploration

If you’ve plunked down for a Samsung Galaxy Note 4 and a Gear VR headset, you’ll be able to watch some rad 360 video from this weekend’s NBA All-Star festivities in New York.

Highlight packages from the Three-Point Contest, Slam-Dunk Contest, and the All-Star Game itself will be available through Samsung’s newly launched Milk VR app that’s exclusive to its devices. The content will be 360-degree video that you can look around as if you were sitting courtside. So it’s not strictly interactive VR or anything. It’s more like really immersive TV.

The article goes on to state that it won’t be live because it takes some time to process the videos together. Well, I am sure there will be a camera rig that can do it live by next year.

In a related story the standards body that makes Displayport just added a spec to handle signals up to 8k in resolution. This is very important because the human eye can see at about 8k. Basically when you view a video in this scale it looks like you are looking out a window. Now to use this for VR would require two 8k streams so we are talking about a huge amount of data. That’s a few years off yet but this is real progress towards totally photorealistic VR.